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Loading... Saga. Book one (edition 2014)by Brian K. Vaughan, Fiona Staples (Artist.) francoisvigneault | May 17, 2021 |   What I liked: • I love the world building and the story telling style. There are stories that start with like 3 different sets of characters that eventually criss-cross over each other, but you see different aspects of the universe in each POV. • The characters are SO FUN. • The art style is gorgeous. • The humor had me laughing out loud multiple times. What I didn’t like: • I honestly have no complaints, in terms of the story—but some of the language makes it obvious that this was written in a different time (the word r*****ed is used and it caught me off guard because you don't really see that used anymore). (  ) kallireads | Sep 4, 2024 |  ) AdioRadley | Jan 21, 2024 | ) Acilladon | Jul 30, 2023 | I would say that Vaughan's writing can get a bit gross and coarse at times, in quite unnecessary ways. It's almost as if he wanted to drive away young readers, which is a shame. ( ) gjky | Apr 9, 2023 |  ) jennybeast | Apr 14, 2022 | ) Jonesy_now | Sep 24, 2021 | Above: A commission of Alana from Saga that I painted for a client a few years back... One of the strengths of this series is its fun character designs. Saga takes place in an anything-goes universe where magic and technology coexist, there are seemingly dozens if not hundreds of intelligent species (including winged, horned, and TV-headed, to name just a few) and, to put it broadly, pretty much anything can happen. This "anything-goes" ethos is both Saga's greatest strength and its biggest weakness. On the positive side, Vaughan and Staples have created a wild and wooly universe that feels like it was lifted straight from a place of pure child-like imagination (Vaughan has mentioned that he began creating this universe when he was a child) and then mixed up throughly with a very adult interest in sex and the anxiety of parenthood. In particular, Fiona Staples' art revels in the extraordinary freedom this universe permits her, and overall I would say that Saga's greatest appeal lies in her often loose and elegant depictions of insane creatures, characters, and situations. This long volume (collecting the first 18 issues of the series) is full of great, memorable, and weird images: A pair of quite friendly prostitutes who are depicted as giant heads perched on fishnet-stockinged legs; a topless, semi-arachnoid bounty hunter; a wounded robot soldier on the battlefield, his TV-screen head flashing explicit porn; and much, much more... It's a lot of fun to see what's coming next. As mentioned above, Saga is also not afraid to tackle sexuality very directly, with a real sense of playful energy and silliness. The book has a fundamentally libertine attitude to sexuality and the power of desire to be a genuinely revolutionary force for good in the universe. The bad side of this "anything can happen" approach is that literally "anything can happen." There is rarely a sense that this universe operates by any sense of rules, order, or logic. Political and economic ideas are introduced and tossed aside ad-hoc. Characters fall in and out of love at the drop off a hat. Key moments in the plot often hinge on some special requirement being met by the characters, but the reader never knows what these conditions will be in advance, and the problems are almost always resolved immediately, so there is no sense of pay-off or stakes (the number of times the characters problems is some variation of "Spell X requires component Y, oh here is component Y" is pretty surprising). In some ways this semi-improvisational seeming approach seems to make sense, given that the characters are on the run for most of this book, making things up as they go and dealing with problems as they appear. It also ties in nicely with some of the storybook themes at work here, many times the story seems like it’s the product of a parent riffing as they weave a bedtime story for their child. There is a lot of fun to be had there, but it also undercuts the potential for a bigger narrative payoff. Perhaps some of these problems are resolved later in the series, but 18 issues in it was leaving me a bit flat. That said, I can understand why this series is so inspiring for readers... Despite the mature elements in the book, this book is full of pure and joyful imagination and creativity. ( ) francoisvigneault | May 17, 2021 | I'm gonna start by saying that I CANNOT WAIT TO GET MY HANDS ON BOOK 2!!! I loved this book so much! It pulled no punches, kept me in suspense, made me laugh and left me needing more! I loved the extra sketches at the end as well... they were a brilliant bonus when I found them. I will be reading the rest of this series at the first given opportunity! ( ) TCLinrow | Mar 17, 2021 | I'm gonna start by saying that I CANNOT WAIT TO GET MY HANDS ON BOOK 2!!! I loved this book so much! It pulled no punches, kept me in suspense, made me laugh and left me needing more! I loved the extra sketches at the end as well... they were a brilliant bonus when I found them. I will be reading the rest of this series at the first given opportunity! ( ) TCLinrow | Mar 17, 2021 | One. The universe this story is set in is haphazard, and relies more on visual oomph or the occasional smart, funny or creepy idea, instead of internal consistency or necessity. Vaughan has created himself a universe that gives him absolute freedom as a writer, and that's too much power for anyone to handle. As anything can happen, in the end, nothing really matters - you know the author can outsmart the mess he might have written himself in any time by introducing yet another testicle giant, a magical wooden space ship, flying sharks or a teenage ghost without a vagina. Two. The writing itself suffers from the comic book format, becoming a predictable formula that ends with a cliffhanger every chapter. It may work in a once a month dosage, but collected in a tome like this, it became rote about halfway through. Three. In the final 5 chapters it dawned on me the two main adult characters continue to be their immature self. As Katelyn Sherman noted: "The horned husband pushes his winged wife and newborn baby off a tower because he secretly knew she could fly even though she didn't think she could and never had before? And then he talks with his ex girlfriend about their relationship and how sorry he is before the wife does indeed come flying back to shoot the ex girlfriend? Ridiculous." Four. The visuals are nice - she sure can draw emotions - but at the same time you see Fiona Staples only gets a month for each issue/chapter. The potential is there, but it's a rush job. It's all digital, resulting in overall flat textures - it's too clean & sterile for my tastes. Most importantly: there simply is not enough variation in her artistic choices, making it - structurally - repetitive. Five. The series isn't finished. 54 comics published at the moment I write this, we are only halfway: 54 have yet to be written, but Vaughan & Staples are on a hiatus to get the creative juices flowing again. In the end - if it ever happens - we should end up with 6 of these hardcover volumes in total. That's about 230 euros in total for what is - all things considered - pulp fiction, and I'm not committing to that. I might borrow book 2 if I ever get the chance, to see if the series redeems itself, but I don't have high hopes. ps - the 40 pages at the end of this specific volume are a 'making of', and it's really interesting, a must read for any serious fan. More reviews on Weighing A Pig (  ) bormgans | Sep 5, 2020 | ) djshiva | Feb 7, 2020 | ) Jon_Hansen | Oct 12, 2019 | 1. It began with a childbirth, and I kept reading. 2. The most attractive character is half-humanoid/half-arachnoid. ( ) chaosfox | Feb 22, 2019 |  ) quondame | Jun 9, 2018 | ) VanChocStrawberry | Apr 2, 2018 | ) anniebairre | Sep 13, 2017 | ) kephradyx | Jun 20, 2017 | Yet it's not the immature kind of "adult": the sex and violence and so one give the story weight and heft, and elevate it into something fully itself. Saga may remind you of Star Wars or Romeo and Juliet or Battlestar Galactica in some ways, but it's not trying to be any of them. Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples have created something really unique, with star-crossed romance (the main characters are from the opposite sides of a deadly war), pathos (there's a bit with Lying Cat that was just heart-wrenching), and the right amount of kookiness (the main characters bond over a cheap paperback romance novel that turns out to have a deeper meaning). Despite the darkness of it, it's beautiful: Fiona Staples I don't think had done much before Saga, but as in Y: The Last Man, Brian Vaughan has found the perfect artistic collaborator for the story he's telling. Horrifying creatures, human emotion, forbidding vistas, beautiful emptiness, all are rendered perfectly by Staples. A lot of depth comes from the narration, which hits the balance between corniness and insight, and is hand-written by Staples herself, the perfect finishing touch. Everything about the book is beautifully done, down to the page and font design by Fonografiks. (The deluxe hardcover has a very in-depth making-of feature, which I really enjoyed. Both Vaughan and Staples have fascinating processes.) The sprawling story (seriously, there's not just our main characters, and their daughter, but also the parents of one of them, and a ghost, and the bounty hunter chasing them and his companions, and a robot prince, and a pair of investigative journalists, and probably others I'm forgetting) moves in genuinely inventive and surprising ways across in first eighteen issues, and I finished it eager to see where it would go next. 1  Stevil2001 | May 19, 2017 | I enjoyed the overall story as well, though for me, having the daughter narrate it ended up taking away from it for me. It pulled some of the suspense away from the story. Every time she was in danger or her parents were in danger, I didn't feel that rush or suspense I should have because I knew she would survive, simply because she is narrating the story from the future. So for me, that really took away. However, everything else really fell into place for me. The artistry, the story, the characterization, the pace, the writing. It all worked really well together. And how sexy is Marko!? Am I right? (  ) Kiddboyblue | Apr 8, 2017 | ) Birdo82 | Jan 15, 2017 | ) victorydiv | May 2, 2016 | ) BenjaminHahn | Dec 30, 2015 | ) LacyLK | Nov 21, 2015 | Of course with a title like Saga, we have to realize that we're going in for the long haul. The first issue came out in March 2012; it's now December 2014. I know, I know, I could pick up the individual comics themselves in order to stay in the world of the story... and who knows, I might do it. Come back and get the big book(s) later on down the road. And for the first time in a very long time with a serialized story, I'm tempted to do it. The breadth of this story is breathtaking and in the two hours it took me to burn through the entire collection (seriously), I was as giddy as a kid watching The Empire Strikes Back - or, frankly, as a 25-year-old watching Guardians. Goodness but I want to live in this wild, lurid, crazy, beautiful world that Vaughan and Staples have created. It is that cool. Full review TK. ( ) drewsof | Sep 30, 2015 | Of course with a title like Saga, we have to realize that we're going in for the long haul. The first issue came out in March 2012; it's now December 2014. I know, I know, I could pick up the individual comics themselves in order to stay in the world of the story... and who knows, I might do it. Come back and get the big book(s) later on down the road. And for the first time in a very long time with a serialized story, I'm tempted to do it. The breadth of this story is breathtaking and in the two hours it took me to burn through the entire collection (seriously), I was as giddy as a kid watching The Empire Strikes Back - or, frankly, as a 25-year-old watching Guardians. Goodness but I want to live in this wild, lurid, crazy, beautiful world that Vaughan and Staples have created. It is that cool. Full review TK. ( ) drewsof | Sep 30, 2015 | |
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Above: A commission of Alana from Saga that I painted for a client a few years back... One of the strengths of this series is its fun character designs.
Saga takes place in an anything-goes universe where magic and technology coexist, there are seemingly dozens if not hundreds of intelligent species (including winged, horned, and TV-headed, to name just a few) and, to put it broadly, pretty much anything can happen.
This "anything-goes" ethos is both Saga's greatest strength and its biggest weakness. On the positive side, Vaughan and Staples have created a wild and wooly universe that feels like it was lifted straight from a place of pure child-like imagination (Vaughan has mentioned that he began creating this universe when he was a child) and then mixed up throughly with a very adult interest in sex and the anxiety of parenthood.
In particular, Fiona Staples' art revels in the extraordinary freedom this universe permits her, and overall I would say that Saga's greatest appeal lies in her often loose and elegant depictions of insane creatures, characters, and situations. This long volume (collecting the first 18 issues of the series) is full of great, memorable, and weird images: A pair of quite friendly prostitutes who are depicted as giant heads perched on fishnet-stockinged legs; a topless, semi-arachnoid bounty hunter; a wounded robot soldier on the battlefield, his TV-screen head flashing explicit porn; and much, much more... It's a lot of fun to see what's coming next. As mentioned above, Saga is also not afraid to tackle sexuality very directly, with a real sense of playful energy and silliness. The book has a fundamentally libertine attitude to sexuality and the power of desire to be a genuinely revolutionary force for good in the universe.
The bad side of this "anything can happen" approach is that literally "anything can happen." There is rarely a sense that this universe operates by any sense of rules, order, or logic. Political and economic ideas are introduced and tossed aside ad-hoc. Characters fall in and out of love at the drop off a hat. Key moments in the plot often hinge on some special requirement being met by the characters, but the reader never knows what these conditions will be in advance, and the problems are almost always resolved immediately, so there is no sense of pay-off or stakes (the number of times the characters problems is some variation of "Spell X requires component Y, oh here is component Y" is pretty surprising). In some ways this semi-improvisational seeming approach seems to make sense, given that the characters are on the run for most of this book, making things up as they go and dealing with problems as they appear. It also ties in nicely with some of the storybook themes at work here, many times the story seems like it’s the product of a parent riffing as they weave a bedtime story for their child. There is a lot of fun to be had there, but it also undercuts the potential for a bigger narrative payoff.
Perhaps some of these problems are resolved later in the series, but 18 issues in it was leaving me a bit flat. That said, I can understand why this series is so inspiring for readers... Despite the mature elements in the book, this book is full of pure and joyful imagination and creativity. (